For years I’ve worked with clients who want to tap the power of the Internet to distribute and transform information, but I’ve never experienced that power quite like I did last week.

My article, “Why Best Buy is Going out of Business…Gradually,” became something of a sensation. By the end of the week, the article had generated coverage in major business media and across the Internet. Late Friday, even the company’s CEO, Brian Dunn, posted a response. (More on that in a moment.)

A few numbers tell the tale:

The article has so far received over 2.3 million page views. By Friday morning, Forbes Managing Editor Bruce Upbin noted, more people had read my article than would shop at a Best Buy all week.

The article was shared by over 12,000 Facebook users and more than 15,000 Twitter users.

In addition to nearly 1,000 comments on Forbes, the article spawned conversations on other discussion boards including Reddit, TechMeme, MetaFilter, and TechCrunch. It was the most-read story on LinkedIn and Forbes this week, and was featured on Google News and other news aggregators.

Thousands of readers responded, most with their own horror stories of dealing with the chain.

I received hundreds of personal emails, most from people who just wanted to vent their own frustration at the poor customer service they had received. Many were from ex or current employees of Best Buy, who confirmed that the management problems I mentioned were epidemic.

Yet my purpose in writing the article couldn’t have been more modest. I have long been interested in why managers and executives misinterpret changing market dynamics. (I’ve written two books on the subject, including “Unleashing the Killer App,” which is still relevant to Best Buy’s current problems.) I’ve just started work on a new book on disruptive market transformations, which will teach even large companies to avoid getting caught in the trap.

Then a pre-New Year’s visit to a local Best Buy store had the unintended consequence of focusing my attention on the electronics retailing giant, which continues to struggle despite the disappearance in 2009 of one of its main competitors, Circuit City.

The poor service at the store led me to dig into the company’s balance sheet and strategic plan, as well as the company’s embarrassing decision to cancel 30,000 online orders just a few days before Christmas for lack of inventory.

Like many companies surprised by the unpredictable transformation of markets at the hands of disruptive digital technologies, I concluded, Best Buy appeared to be going out of business two ways: “Gradually, then suddenly.”

By early Monday morning, it was clear something unusual was happening. In the middle of the night on a national holiday, there were over 100,000 page views just in the first few hours.

As the week went on, momentum built. The page views accelerated mid-week, and new stories about the article proliferated in print, on the radio, and on the web. After Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn wrote his own response to the article on a company website, the volume of buzz amped up again.

Clearly, I’d struck a chord with Best Buy customers. And while any large retailer is bound to have generated its share of horror stories, there was something more personal about the abuse Best Buy customers reported and the sense of combat fatigue they felt on entering the store. Just page through the comments on the original post to see what I mean.

(As a side note, I apologize to those who sent me literally thousands of emails, Tweets, and discussion comments. I feel your pain, and wish I had time to respond to each of you individually.)

But the story inevitably hit a few nerves as well.

The company did not respond to my written request for comment or reply to the article. But Best Buy insiders passed along what appears to be the company’s internal script for responding to customer and press inquiries about my story:

Refer to the following PR talking points when handling any customer inquiries about this article:

We disagree with the premise of blogger Larry Downes in his recent post on forbes.com.We think Best Buy is here for the long term. After all, Best Buy plays a unique role in the world of consumer electronics – we combine the “what” of the industry (the world’s most comprehensive portfolio of cutting-edge products) and the “how”, services to turn everything on, connect it and protect it.We have strong growth initiatives that include global connections, expanded services, expansion into China and a growing e-commerce presence.

Yes, we know that we had issues with some online orders over the holidays and as a result, we disappointed some customers. We are truly sorry if we ruined anyone’s holiday. Rest assured that we are working on resolving the issues that caused those problems so that they will not occur again.

We know our accountability starts and ends with our customers.

We will continue to define ourselves by relentlessly focusing on the customer and going where the growth is.

I also heard from plenty of current Best Buy employees, both via Forbes and through private emails. Best Buy has a strong sales culture at the stores, and some employees took the article personally. I called out some of their (non-obscene) comments on the original post, in part because I think they inadvertently highlight what’s wrong with the company’s current strategy.

Employees, I learned, are strongly conditioned to see every customer who walks in the store as a potential target, one who needs to be coerced into buying something other than what they came looking for.

But you can’t treat the customer as an adversary in a battle of wills. You can’t provide superior service when you’ve been drilled to view each person who walks into your store as prey. You can’t be a trusted source of expertise on consumer electronics when, as many former employees told me, failure to follow the company script means getting your hours cut or simply being fired.

Best Buy employees are trained to focus on customers. But not so much to serve them as to overpower them. It is not being “customer-centric” when your laser-beam focus is on sizing the customer up and looking for weaknesses in their resistance to buying products and service they didn’t come looking for.

That, at least, was the conversation until Friday. Then the other shoe dropped.